The golden fund of the domestic detective! For several generations now, readers and television viewers have been enthusiastically following the investigations of Inspector Stas Tikhonov, the Soviet Commissar Maigret. Each of his cases is not only an exciting plot, a psychological battle between a criminal and an investigator, but a document of the era, written brilliantly and subtly. “Vertical Races.” The story of the confrontation between a brilliant criminal and an investigator, unwinding a tangled tangle of mysterious crimes layered on top of each other, remains timeless. And, like many years ago, the reader is again unwittingly drawn into a duel of reason and intuition, into the deadly “Vertical Race”! “I, investigator...” On the Yalta-Karadag highway, the corpse of a man with a gunshot wound to the head was discovered. In a hopeless case, there are only questions: who was killed and why? Who killed?.. Based only on fragmentary information, detective Stas Tikhonov follows the criminal - like a hunter on the trail of an animal, being only three, two, one step late. Who will shoot first next time?